A new Energy Museum at Los Angeles’s
Exposition Park proposes a provocative
landmark for energy research and
education in the city. Combining
emerging building technologies and
materials with an engaging form, this
new structure could help redefine the
floundering park complex.
Such close proximity to the Museum of
Natural History’s original neoclassical
building seems to necessitate a
departure from traditional or
referential formal, tectonic, or material
strategies. In every way except scale, this
project contradicts its neighbor: soft/
hard, curved/straight, light/heavy, new/old.
The pneumatic structure’s form-finding
was performed through experimental
physical and digital modeling techniques
where a soft material is inflated and
deformed against a series of harder
restraints with the aim of developing a
new tectonic for the project. From there,
site specific restraint placement allowed
for endless formal manipulations.